Visual cognition is an important area of biocybernetics. It ranges from the filtering processes of early vision to the structural and functional organization of the visual centres, as well as, in higher animals, to the neuronal plasticity, the decision-making rules, the effect of noise, the role of attention, the ambiguity of patterns, and the time dimension. All these factors contribute to the cognitive interpretation of visual sensation that takes place in visual perception. A side field is machine vision, in which the signal processing known from animal vision is applied to the mobile robots responding to light stimulation.

The light sense is conceivably the key sense in both the animal and the plant kingdom. Vision research, undoubtedly a fast-growing field, is providing impressive results OCo thanks to modern theoretical and methodological advances. The approach of biophysics and neuroscience seems to be of great benefit and, for this reason, the present book gives an outline of recent acquisitions and updated advanced methods concerning this approach. Visual mechanisms and processes are analysed at several (molecular, cellular, integrative, computational and cognitive) levels by different methodologies (from molecular biology to computation) applied to different living models (from protists to humans, via invertebrates and lower vertebrates). Contents: The Optics of Animal Eyes (M F Land); Rhodopsin-Like Proteins: The Universal and Probably Unique Proteins for Vision (P Gualtieri); The Molecular Design of a Visual Cascade: Molecular Stages of Phototransduction in Drosophila (R Paulsen et al.); Molecular Changes During Primary Visual Pathway Development (K L Moya et al.); Color Vision and Retinal Randomness of the Japanese Yellow Swallowtail Butterfly, Papilio Xuthus (K Arikawa et al.); Patch-Clamping Solitary Visual Cells to Understand the Cellular Mechanisms of Invertebrate Phototransduction (C Musio); Phototransduction in Retinal Rods and Cones (Y Koutalos et al.); Formation of OC ONOCO and OC OFFOCO Ganglion Cell Mosaics (L M Chalupa); Endogenous Nitric Oxide Modulates Signal Transmission from Photoreceptors to On-Center Bipolar Cells in the Rabbit Retina (B Lei & I Perlman); Now You See It, Now You Don't: Shunting Inhibition in Early Vision (L Borg-Graham et al.); Visual Perceptual Learning (N Berardi & A Fiorentini); Functions of the Primate Temporal Lobe Cortical Visual Areas in Invariant Visual Object and Face Recognition (E T Rolls); Vector Code in Neuronal Networks (E N Sokolov); and other papers. Readership: Scientists and postdoctoral students in neurosciences, biophysics and physiology."

Perception is the first step in the whole of the cognitive processes (attention, learning, memory, categorization, imagery, intuition, inference, comprehension, thought, judgement, expression) which culminate in the reasoning activity and to which emotions make a contribution. The production of perception representations is correlated with the perception events. Such perception representations occur by means of the contribution of two kinds of factors: sensory signals which reproduce the spatio-temporal characteristics of the receptor modifications, and interpretation of the intrinsic ambiguity of such signals by means of unconscious inferences. Various interactions intervene between bottom-up signals from peripheral receptors and top-down signals from higher centres.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Brain, Vision and Artificial Intelligence, BVAI 2007. Coverage includes: basic models in visual sciences, cortical mechanism of vision, color processing in natural vision, action oriented vision, visual recognition and attentive modulation, biometric recognition, image segmentation and recognition, disparity calculation and noise analysis, meaning-interaction-emotion, and robot navigation.

This book deals primarily with the role of emotions in the mechanisms of memory. It is a compilation of the lectures given at a course conducted at the International School of Biocybernetics.

For a few decades, the puzzle of consciousness, which for centuries was analysed by philosophers, has been finding a wide interest in the scientific field, where previously it was not entitled to be a member. It has become one of the most-debated problems in the cognitive sciences. The anatomical bases, neurophysiological correlates and elementary mechanisms underlying complex processes arising with consciousness have been compared with the psychological (perceptive, cognitive, volitive, emotional) aspects of conscious expressions, in normal and pathological conditions. Various theories, which attempt to fit systematically and coherently neural and psychological data, have been debated, proving the emergence of the phenomenon of consciousness.

This volume looks at the associative mechanisms of the brain, particularly of the cortico-limbic and diencephalic systems, and also at the macromolecular effects on them, by integrating the contributions of various disciplines converging on one subject and from different points of view. It addresses the question of how so many different activity levels — the biochemical, physiological, and psychological ones — interact in integrative processes. The topics treated include brain reverberating systems and associative phenomena; long-term potentiation, learning, and memory; gene activity and brain activity; and gene expression and information processing during sleep.